Some random reflections on the late Queen of England (and Scotland, Wales & Northern Island and not-forgetting the Commonwealth) I only ever encountered the late Queen of England — Elizabeth II — once in real life. This was back in the mid-1970s when I was still practicing as a barrister…

Or… did Steely Dan predict the future 50 years ago? This summer I’ve been taking advantage of the fine weather to do a lot of outdoor jobs — many of them the kind of mindless activities (like repainting a barn) you can do while listening to iTunes and still having…

Don’t Panic Captain Mainwaring

This is an approximate transcript of storytelling gig I performed recently in a Medieval church in Suffolk (England). We’re talking history, folklore, and demonology spiced with a large dose of imagination… Let me tell you a story about the Wicked Nuns of St Mary’s in the centre of the Suffolk…

Here’s some dark lore about a shackled skeleton found in a South Norfolk (UK) duckpond. I’m back doing my short dark folklore and history videos on YouTube so here’s the (sort-of) script for my latest offering… The video starts with a shot of the rural landscape and I say: “These…

Or another shameless new book plug! Apologies for seeming to be like a London bus: there’s no new books from me for 12 months and then two come along within the same month! This is my new, new book and the second in my Haunted Landscapes series of nonfiction folklore…

Did I really say 10?

​Earlier this year I spent an inordinate amount of time researching Japanese folklore for background information for a science fiction novel I was writing. Readers… the novel was put out of its misery at the 20,000 words make but the research lives so in this post we head to Japan…

Or… Weird Tales for Weird Times Welcome to my new publication Weird Times — an occasional publication devoted to weird tales, factoids, coincidences, remembrances, and other arcana from history, legend, folklore, urban myth and pop culture plus anything else that intrigues the editor. …